The Gawain Legacy

by Jon Mackley

  Lara stiffened, indignant. Who was he to talk about ‘extreme emotions’, when only days before he had been waiting for a train to take his life?

  But, the fact she’d been affected by his comment meant perhaps he had a point. In another time, under other circumstances, Will would have been sensitive and considerate: he was intelligent, linguistic, musical and he could cook. What a shame Janet had been so unsure of her love for him that she had had to look elsewhere and paid dearly for her mistake.

  ‘Do you have a sister?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Will said, shocked.

  ‘Just you talking about your sister in Lyons. I wondered if she exists.’

  ‘Not in Lyons. Back in Buckinghamshire. Not seen her in more than a year. We were close once.’ He looked away, leaving her with a hundred unspoken questions – what’s her name? How old is she? What does she do? Any other brothers or sisters? But she sensed she had touched on to Will’s private thoughts and he had built up a wall as impenetrable as those surrounding Avignon itself.

  The lift jerked to a stop. The doors hissed open. They walked down a long passage and Will unlocked the door. The room was white and airy. Another door led to an en-suite shower. Lara stepped over to the window to look at the illuminated walls of the city.

  ‘We’ll head out for a meal,’ Will told her, then smiled down at her. ‘If that’s all right by you.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘You might be exhausted.’

  She smiled, but there was no warmth in the gesture. ‘I could run a marathon if there’s food.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Will said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They walked outside the city walls until they reached the Porte de la République, one of the main city entrances. This led to the main commercial centre of the city. Lara’s mind raced from excitement to terror. The buildings were so different to anything she had seen before. She was overpowered by the smells of fresh vegetables, roasted chickens and cheeses from market stalls. At the same time, she wondered what she would do if she was separated from Will. One of the reasons she travelled so infrequently was because she was terrified of being in a place where she couldn’t communicate.

  She glanced behind her, wondering if someone might have followed them, but all she saw was the milling crowds, walking past the closed shops. Her heart missed a beat as a car appeared from one of the dark side streets, its bass rhythm thumping through her. Crowds bothered her. She stopped in her tracks when she saw a large group of people amassed outside a takeaway pizza kiosk, and walked into the road to avoid going near them. In the distance she saw the red flashing lights of a police car.

  They entered the Place de l’Horloge, a wide market square. There were many restaurants; the visitors were able to enjoy the nightlife by sitting in glass conservatories. It was too cold to sit outside for a drink. The dark skies threatened imminent rain. She started at the sound of the low chimes of a bell and looked up at a white tower to see two automaton figures striking the hour.

  ‘This would have been the Forum when the city was occupied by the Romans,’ Will told her. He laughed. ‘Place de l’Horloge: It’s almost called “Time Square”, I think that sounds better than “Place of the Clock”.’

  She gazed round at the huge white arches of the theatre, and the Hôtel de Ville, which encompassed the great tower where she had seen the carillon and mechanical figures striking the bell.

  She jumped when Will placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘Will you calm down?’ he whispered gently. ‘You’re drawing attention to yourself.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘More than you’d realise.’ He pointed to one of the side streets. She saw the gaudy and welcoming lights of a number of restaurants in the distance. ‘How about getting away from everyone and going somewhere quiet?’

  She nodded. Will turned into a dark side street. Lara hesitated, then followed when he pointed to a restaurant that promised traditional French cuisine, sitting in the shadow of a church. Unlike the buildings in the Place de l’Horloge, time and traffic had blackened the church’s stones. Will walked up the steps to look at the name of the church and the tourist information. ‘Saint-Agricol’, he told her when he returned. ‘Originally tenth century but the façade is fifteenth century. Not what we’re looking for. How are you with eating snails or frogs legs?’

  ‘Get real,’ Lara said grimacing. ‘I prefer not to eat molluscs or amphibians.’

  ‘Just wondering if you’d only be happy with bacon and eggs?’

  ‘I’ll find something,’ Lara said bitterly. She peered behind her. No one was following.

  ‘The French have got it right,’ Will said. ‘Their rationale is “if it moves, eat it,” whether it’s fish or shark, or beef or horse or whatever. They make no bones about their food.’

  ‘Can’t ever imagine eating horse,’ Lara said.

  ‘It’s quite rich, but tastes like beef. The trick is to either marinate it or smear it in a heavy sauce so the unsuspecting tourist doesn’t realise what he’s being given.’

  ‘How about a salad?’ Lara said hopefully.

  Will smiled and this time she thought it touched his eyes. ‘I doubt you’d be so lucky.’ He hesitated by the door. ‘You’ve gone green, Lara. Are you sure you want to try this?’

  She swallowed the rising nausea, gritted her teeth and nodded.

  The room was dimly lit in subdued red and orange colours. The log fire and gentle piano music made it homely and welcoming. A waiter dressed in a white dinner jacket and a bow tie greeted them with a smile. ‘Bonsoir, monsieur, madame.’

  ‘Bonsoir,’ Will replied. ‘Une table pour deux, s’il vous plaît.’

  ‘Bien sûr, monsieur,’ the waiter said and directed them to a table by the window. There was another couple on the other side of the restaurant, starry lovers, drowning in each other’s eyes. The waiter took their coats and they sat down. He appeared a few moments later bringing them leather bound menus. ‘Vous désirez des boissons?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you want a drink, Lara?’ Will asked. He stopped and thought. ‘Do you drink wine?’

  Lara was surprised; it was the first time she had seen him consider anything other than coffee. ‘Sure,’ she stammered.

  Will flicked open the wine menu and pointed to one of the red wines. ‘Une bouteille de Côtes du Rhône, s’il vous plaît.’

  The waiter gave a small bow and left. ‘I ordered a bottle of the local red. Is that all right?’

  Lara nodded. ‘I’m surprised. I thought you were pretty much tee-total.’

  ‘There’s a time and a place for drinking. And with a decent meal, a long way away from anyone who might be following us, it’s about the right place. I think we’ve got some time before anyone realises we’re in Avignon.’

  Lara settled back in the chair. ‘That’s comforting. I thought I would have to look over my shoulder all the way through the meal.’

  ‘Que sera, sera,’ Will promised. ‘If they storm the restaurant there’s nothing we can do about it, so we may as well relax and enjoy the meal. I’ve paid cash for everything in France, so hopefully the only hint our friends will have that we’re out of the country is that our names will be on a flight record in Gatwick and that we passed through passport control in Marseilles. After that, they won’t have a clue. We could have flown to Nîmes. I wanted to make sure we weren’t going to the nearest airport.’ He stroked his chin, and there was a rough sound of his skin against the stubble. ‘Perhaps we should have gone a different way.’

  ‘It’s done now,’ Lara said, then added, ‘And you said I was the worry-guts!’

  ‘I worry to stay alive,’ Will said. ‘Not about things like calories, cost and complexion.’ He smiled then. ‘But, to be fair, I think you worry about some of the right things as well. You’ve never said to me something has too many calories.’

  ‘I’ve always been naturally slim. It doesn’t matter what I eat.’

  ‘I bet other wom
en hate you when you say that.’

  ‘I don’t say it very often.’ Her eyes glazed as she tried to read the menu. ‘I can’t read this,’ she said uneasily. ‘Would you order for me? Only please don’t make it snails or horse.’

  ‘How about frogs?’

  ‘Or frogs.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know whether I’d ordered you frog’s legs or chicken in batter. They taste the same.’

  ‘I don’t want to find out,’ she said, shifting uncomfortably.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  The waiter returned with a bottle of wine. He showed Will the label and when he nodded he opened the bottle and poured a little for him to taste. Trying to hold back a smile at this sudden burst of culture, Lara watched him nod and the waiter poured two glasses. ‘Vous avez choisi?’ he asked.

  Will ordered for himself, then smiled at Lara ‘Et pour madame …’ he spoke quickly in French, smiling at her occasionally, knowing she didn’t understand. The waiter nodded, gave his little bow and walked away. ‘What did you order?’ Lara asked, tensing.

  ‘Wait and see,’ Will said. He raised his glass. ‘A toast, I think. To finding out what the Gawain-poet meant.’

  Lara chinked her glass with his. ‘And not getting caught in the process.’ The wine was rich and smooth. She wondered when she had tasted a wine so fruity. It was a long time since she had had alcohol. She wondered when she had last sat in a restaurant of this calibre. Michael had rarely taken her out, and certainly to nowhere like this. She was unused to this kind of relaxed formality and unsure of what to say.

  ‘Excellent wine,’ she managed.

  ‘Côtes du Rhône,’ Will said. ‘It means it’s grown in those vineyards by the side of the river.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever drunk a wine so near to its place of origin. I mean, you don’t get closer to the Côtes du Rhône,’ he indicated behind her. ‘They’re about fifty metres that way.’ He smiled, then studied the wine label.

  ‘Why history, Will?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why teach history?’

  ‘I guess I have a passion for it,’ he said. He thought, then looked past her, eyes glazing over and becoming distant. ‘I went to a good school. There wasn’t anything that caught my interest. I managed to get by in all my GCSEs, all the things you’re expected to do, Maths and English, French and German, combined science, music and twentieth century history. My parents …’ His brow started to furrow and he took a long sip from his wine, ‘… they wanted me to do A-Levels. I did what I was told because I didn’t have a direction. By a process of elimination, I took French, English and History and thought I’d do English at University.

  ‘I managed to bomb my English exam. Didn’t know what I did wrong, but managed to get A grades in the other two subjects. It wasn’t enough for me to get to University to study English so I took a year out. I did two A-levels by correspondence course in my “year out”. I re-took English literature, concentrating on fourteenth century material and did another A-level in history, this time focusing on the Middle Ages. Suddenly history came alive for me. I finally went to University and when it came to writing my dissertation, and under the careful direction of one of the professors, I was allowed to work in the archives with original documents.

  ‘They say hindsight is the greatest of teachers, but the lessons of history are so much more prominent,’ he sighed. ‘It’s written there in black and white. History isn’t just an opportunity to try and understand everything that’s happened in the past, it’s about discovering what’ll happen in the future. Coming to somewhere like Avignon is a million times better because you can actually reach out and touch everything that’s happened.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sometimes when I look at places like this I can almost feel myself stepping back through time. I can walk through the streets and see the popes and the people in their cap-a-dos and other medieval costumes.’ His brow furrowed again. ‘Don’t you ever feel like that?’

  ‘Sometimes, maybe,’ Lara admitted. ‘But never with such clarity. Maybe I just lack your imagination.’

  ‘I don’t think it takes an imagination,’ Will said as the waiter turned up and placed a plate in front of her. ‘I think it takes an empathy with the past.’

  ‘Bon Appétit, monsieur, dame,’ the waiter said and left.

  Lara looked down at the plate, almost not daring to see what Will had ordered for her. She was pleasantly surprised to see prawns set in avocado, covered with French vinaigrette. The plate was decorated with a small salad.

  ‘I hope you like prawns,’ Will said. ‘It was either that or,’ he indicated to his own plate, ‘snails.’ She tried not to grimace at his plate and the smell of the thick sauce of oil and garlic. He broke open one of the shells and speared the meat with his fork. ‘Do you want to try one? I promise it won’t try to run away.’ He was smiling, but she saw he was serious in his offer. She felt her stomach churning, tried to settle it with a taste of the wine, then shook her head and set about devouring the avocado and prawns.

  Her taste buds were almost overpowered by the rich food. Will poured her another glass of wine. ‘What do you think is out there?’ she asked. ‘What do you think the poet was trying to hide? And why did he travel all the way out here to hide it?’

  ‘He could have been a knight travelling back from somewhere. Perhaps the poem was written after 1387 and the poet believed in the authority of the Anti-pope, and not the Pope. Perhaps he deposited it here, knowing England was not ready for whatever he had hidden. I just don’t know.’ He broke open another shell. ‘He was possibly a clergyman with an illicit daughter. You’ve read Pearl? He speaks of his “pryuy perle”, the “hidden” pearl.’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps it was the Pope himself, although why the Pope would write in a Chester dialect is beyond me, unless he wanted to see the holy well for himself and dictated something for the local people to write down.’

  ‘And where would he find time to write poetry of that nature? Surely he would concentrate more upon the Christian motif rather than the Pagan images.’

  ‘You think it’s Pagan? I thought it was more Christian trying to overcome the Pagan gods.’

  ‘Well, this Green Knight is symbolic of nature, the way it dies in the winter to regenerate in the spring; and the way Gawain decapitates the knight, it’s like the pollarding of an old tree.’

  ‘All true,’ Will admitted. ‘In older legends, Gawain was associated with the Celtic sun god Gwalchmai, who drew his power from the sun and became stronger towards noon and had his strength wane in the afternoon.’ He broke open another shell. ‘In the thirteenth century, when the Grail legend started to become more prominent, it was Gawain who was sent to look for it. Of course, the later writers realised Gawain had pagan origins and forbade him from looking for the Grail, and so it was left to the more Christian knights, Galahad, Percival and Bors. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try one of these?’ he asked, pointing to the few remaining snails.

  Lara shook her head and indicated for him to continue.

  ‘Having said that, Gawain wasn’t Christian enough to search for the Grail, the poet does give him a lot of Christian ideals, not least the fact that on his journey he comes across all sorts of pagan creatures like giants and fairies. But the poet dismisses all of them in a single line, and says he doesn’t have the time to tell a tenth of Gawain’s deeds. He has to meet his chivalric challenges with good grace.’

  ‘Do you think it’s possible the poet found the Grail and hid it in Avignon?’ Lara asked with a smile.

  Will shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely. We’d be following crackpot theories and looking in Rennes-le-Château, Rosslyn Chapel or even under the Grande Pyramide in the Louvre. Personally, I doubt the Grail ever existed. It suddenly springs into literature in the twelfth century. Frankly, I think it’s a myth created to inspire Christianity when all else was failing.’ He leaned back in his chair, having finished the snails. ‘But
let’s not talk about Gawain all night, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to worry about him when we get to the Papal palace tomorrow.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Same as before, something that’s out of place in the design of the building. Something the poet would have seen if he was an ambassador to Avignon. I guess we’ll know if we see it.’ He took a sip of his wine. ‘But enough of that. Let’s talk about you?’

  ‘What about me?’ She suddenly felt he was prying into those private thoughts she tried to hide. It was a mercy the waiter appeared to take the plates.

  ‘How were the prawns?’ Will asked.

  Lara was surprised. ‘Good. Thank you.’

  ‘Just good?’

  ‘Better than good, wonderful.’ She looked at him cautiously. ‘What’s the next course?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ Will said with an enigmatic smile.

  She did not have long to wait. The waiter appeared with a plate of flame-grilled lamb chops cooked with garlic and herbs; the flavour had filtered into the meat. She did not dare ask what animal the steak Will was eating had come from. Will ordered another bottle of wine and filled their glasses with the remains of the first. ‘Careful, Will,’ she said. ‘You’ll have me under the table in no time.’

  ‘So have you done much travelling?’ Will asked.

  ‘Not under the table,’ Lara said, giggling. She regained her composure. ‘My father was always reluctant to travel. Thought he could see what he wanted at home. The first time I went abroad was with an organised school-trip to Paris when I was thirteen. I guess I was disappointed. It was like being in England with a load of different buildings.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘When you’re with a large group of English people, you barely hear people speaking French. If you have a problem with the language you look to someone standing next to you and ask what was said.’ She smiled uncomfortably. ‘It’s like being here with you. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you and had to try and find my own way back home.’